His book is a miracle of thoroughness, truthfulness and readability - the perfect primer for a time when China is about to enter all our lives

Jonathan Fenby's ... illuminating book [is] the first major history that looks at the country with the eyes of the 21st century rather than the 20th

[It] reads like a novel and is never less than thoughtful and compassionate for the fate of a much-abused people ... [Fenby has] a journalist's eye for telling detail

Taut, anecdote-studded ... a great introduction for a general audience, with vivid scene setting and character sketches

For an accessible, authoritative, fair and comprehensive and well written account, this would be hard to better

A wonderful history of modern China and a cracking good read

[A] vivid portrayal… As a social historian, Todd demonstrates the many factors, other than sheer talent and determination, that went into the “making” of Shelagh Delaney…she was part of the new wave of working-class talent that during the Fifties and Sixties transformed every area of creative life, from theatre and literature to art, music and fashion

A clever, hopeful and cheering book…shocking and sobering on how working people have forcibly become divorced from the arts

Selina Todd’s portrait of the artist against the backdrop of her changing times pays a warmly illuminating tribute to Delaney's unique voice… Todd shows in jaw-dropping detail the depth of the hostility to Delaney and her unapologetic work

Delaney was a trailblazer... Tastes of Honey is a biography of a writer whose output has – at times – been overshadowed by distorted versions of her story. By carefully emphasizing the radical qualities of Delaney’s oeuvre, and challenging many of the clichés that make up the mythology, Selina Todd offers a more nuanced view

Todd shows how Delaney anticipated the concerns of the Women's Liberation Movement of the 1970s, and reveals her continuing influence in the light of similar problems facing working-class women now…fascinating

Todd presents a warm but balanced view of a woman who made her own choices. Her work benefits from excellent digging in the BBC archives and many detailed interviews

Not just a terrific study of the life and work of an extraordinary talent but a bracing contextualisation of her in terms of class, culture, sex, youth, politics and the North. Selina Todd’s biography of Delaney is as tough, smart and lively as Shelagh herself

Sparky . . . captures what made that 1958 play [A Taste of Honey] an era-defining classic

A breezy, readable new biography… Todd’s portrait is enlivened by anecdotes from friends and family… she uses a polyphonic approach…including many examples from other ordinary women’s adjacent experiences

I...hugely enjoyed Tastes of Honey, Selina Todd’s heroic attempt to do the impossible and explain the life and work of the mysterious Shelagh Delaney. Alongside Andrea Dunbar, Delaney was our most unexpected and gifted postwar playwright

[A] brilliant biography

What makes Atkinson an exceptional writer – and this is her most ambitious and most gripping work to date – is that she does so with an emotional delicacy and understanding that transcend experiment or playfulness. Life After Life gives us a heroine whose fictional underpinning is permanently exposed, whose artificial status is never in doubt; and yet one who feels painfully, horribly real to us.

Deliriously inventive, sharply imagined and ultimately affecting...The scenes set in Blitz-stricken London will stay with me forever...Atkinson has written something that amounts to so much more than the sum of its (very many) parts. It almost seems to imply that there are new and mysterious things to feel and say about the nature of life and death, the passing of time, fate and possibility.. . [a]magnificently tender and humane novel.

Brilliantly researched, Jack Fairweather's book is both gripping and powerfully written - a riveting and deeply moving tale of courage in the face of unimaginable horror